Tag Archives: product

“What I get to do is take that insight into how people think and how people behave and turn it into something, a product or a service, that is going to make their lives better. It’s going to improve their lives in some way that they may not even be able to articulate. To be able to make some small part of their experience better, and all of those little experiences add up to the sum of somebody’s life… the ability to touch people in that way is really profound.” – Jesse James Garrett

Note: Last portion of the quote has been slightly paraphrased for clarity.

“Ultimately, we are deluding ourselves if we think that the products that we design are the ‘things’ that we sell, rather than the individual, social and cultural experience that they engender, and the value and impact that they have. Design that ignores this is not worthy of the name.” – Bill Buxton’s “personal mantra”

“Most [clients] expect experience design to be a discrete activity, solving all their problems with a single functional specification or a single research study. It must be an ongoing effort, a process of continually learning about users, responding to their behaviors, and evolving the product or service.” – Dan Brown

“Technological advances have always been driven more by a mind-set of ‘I can’ than ‘I should’… Technologists love to cram maximum functionality into their products. That’s ‘I can’ thinking, which is driven by peer competition and market forces… But this approach ignores the far more important question of how the consumer will actually use the device… focus on what we should be doing, not just what we can.” – John Maeda

“I view a user experience as a conversation between people separated over the distance of time. At one end of that conversation are those who create the product; at the other, the people who use it. In between is the product itself—with a design that either helps or hinders; creates a barrier-free interaction or shouts in an unfamiliar language. Because this conversation does not happen in real time, we are not there to smooth over the rough spots and make sure that we have spoken clearly. Instead, we have to build our understanding of those users into every aspect of the design, by putting people—users—at the center of the design process.” – Whitney Quesenbery